IoT threatens to be a familiar story for IT leaders. Yes, it’s disruptive. IoT can unlock both opportunity and value. And no, it’s not an easy model to transition to. This may be why to date relatively few best IoT practices have emerged and while IoT is far from sound and fury signifiying nothing, the something that it does signify remains unclear. Faced with this reality, technology leaders need to identify the compelling business value IoT Use Cases will deliver. And for now, they’d do well to focus on those that deliver quickly ideally with results quantifiable within the first year.

In the two preceding blogs we’ve looked at what modern energy utilities need to achieve commercial success and why many are struggling to deliver in the face of outdated legacy IT infrastructures. In this blog we’ll start to move from identifying the problem to outlining a solution.

In the previous blog, we established that as energy networks evolve to become smarter and more distributed, legacy IT infrastructures haven’t been able to keep up. In this blog, we’ll look in a little more detail about why that’s the case.

Technology innovation is changing the landscape across industry borders. In the energy utilities sectors, for instance, transformation is happening in the form of distributed assets and evolved technologies (think smart grids, for example.) These are changing traditional ways of doing business.

While LTE appears to have become the face of 4G, for all the introductory hype the final nature of 5G networks remains unclear not least with the question of standardization still evolving. So in talking about it – as the entire industry seems to be doing –, one appropriate question to ask is: “Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Do we really need to worry about 5G yet?” Perhaps. We’ll come back to that in a minute. First, though, let’s lay out what we do know about 5G.

In the rush to become active (or even expert) in the Internet of (Every)Things (IoE/IoT) there’s an increasing amount of noise. But as with most high-profile trends the hype tends to run ahead of real insight. DigitalRoute’s blog is only one of many places where you’ll probably be bombarded with the term IoT so we thought that rather than jumping in with the solutions, a better starting point might be defining the questions.

As much time (and angst) as the industry devotes to the subject, here’s one thing about telco; the absence of standards never stood in the way of a great technology breakthrough! Shoot now ask questions later is familiar territory.